Public Enemy Era
Machine Gun Kelly
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Machine Gun Kelly, real name George F. Barnes, was born on July 18, 1900 and grew up in an upper middle class background in Memphis. However, he drifted into bootlegging during high school when his father began seeing another woman after his mother died. He lasted a single semester at college before dropping out, which caused his father to disown him. Marriage to the daughter of a Memphis millionaire should have guaranteed an easy life but his father-in-law died and Kelly found himself bootlegging again. Unfortunately, he was soon caught and his wife left him, taking their two sons with her, when he was sentenced to a work camp for six months in 1924. Choosing to run rather than serve the time, he clearly planned to become a full-time criminal since he changed his last name to Kelly to spare his family any embarrassment.
Kelly was not the most careful bootlegger and when the police found him smuggling alcohol onto an Indian reservation in 1927, he ended up with five years in Leavenworth, where he came to know veteran bank robbers. Good behavior won him an early parole in 1930, and he began taking part in bank jobs but Kelly proved to lack the stomach needed for such a high pressure career, so leading bank robbers like Harvey Bailey and Verne Miller stopped working with him. He married Kathryn Thorne later that year and tried to branch out into kidnapping but allowing his wife to select the victim was ill-advised, since the man had to be released because he was not rich. Although he was clearly not ready for the big leagues, Kelly still managed to team up with Eddie Bentz and Albert Bates to rob a series of banks in Washington, Texas and Mississippi during 1932. Nicknaming her husband Machine Gun Kelly, Kathryn did not seem to realize that bank robbers do not need press agents, and her constant boasting about Kelly’s skill as a bank robber caught the FBI’s attention after the Kansas City Massacre on June 17, 1933 when they were tracing every possible lead.
Since Kelly kidnapped Oklahoma City oilman Charles Urschel on the evening of July 22, this was not the best time to attract attention. Kathryn proved to have horrible judgment and even befriended an undercover Fort Worth detective named Ed Weatherford, who figured out from various clues that Kelly was probably responsible for kidnapping Urschel. However, Gus Jones, the FBI agent in charge of the Urschel case ignored his tip. Kathryn’s mother had married a man named Robert “Boss” Shannon and Urschel would be held at his farm in Texas, north of Fort Worth. The Urschel case would receive national attention because the ransom set a new record. After constant pressure, Weatherford finally convinced the FBI to tap Kathryn’s phone but the FBI’s sole photo of Kelly had been misfiled and could not be located. This was unfortunate since Urschel’s wife had seen the kidnappers and there would soon be another witness. Kelly had set up a plan where the ransom of $200,000 was to be thrown out of a train but he was unable to make it to the drop point, so he actually ended up meeting the man delivering the money face to face without a mask. Urschel was released later the next day, July 31.
Even though Urschel had been blindfolded, Jones was able to obtain enough information to conclude that he had been held in North Texas. Ignoring Weatherford’s belief that Kelly was the kidnapper, he focused on finding the farmhouse where Urschel had been held, even though the FBI agents in Dallas had become converts to Weatherford’s theory. Since all of his requests for specific information about Texas went through the Dallas office, the agents there were able to show that their suspected location matched Urschel’s memories, which finally persuaded Jones to order it checked out. Posing as a bank examiner, an FBI agent saw the house firsthand and determined that it matched Urschel’s description. Jones led three Dallas FBI agents, four Fort Worth detectives, including Weatherford, four Dallas policemen, an Oklahoma City detective and Urschel on a dawn raid on August 12. Urschel recognized both the house and the house’s occupants including Kathryn’s mother, but an unexpected catch was Harvey Bailey, the veteran bank robber who had mentored Miller, Alvin Karpis and the Barkers, and was the key suspect in the Kansas City Massacre case. Both the owner of the house and his son signed confessions that named Kelly as the kidnapper but Jones was only able to keep the news out of the papers for three days. Hours after the raid on the house, Denver police arrested Kelly’s partner, Albert Bates. Although FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover happily took credit for the arrest, the police had actually been notified by American Express investigators who had been chasing Bates for passing stolen American Express traveler’s checks.
While the FBI had a rock solid case against Kelly, they lacked one thing, information about his location. Like many outlaws, the Kellys chose St. Paul, Minnesota as the best place to launder the ransom money and Kelly promptly started living large, buying Kathryn jewelry and a mink coat. Their celebratory mood disappeared when they learned that Kathryn’s mother had been arrested and the police knew that they were involved in the kidnapping. It was decided that Kelly would hide out with Kathryn’s relatives in West Texas while she arranged for a lawyer to represent her mother but when the FBI began investigating the area, Kelly got nervous and took off for Mississippi. Unfortunately, the constant pressure of a national manhunt continued and on August 28 he abruptly decided to return home to Memphis instead of waiting in Mississippi for his wife. Memphis was safe because the FBI had not learned his real name. The couple was finally reunited on September 11 but the man Kathryn had hired to serve as a go-between her and her mother’s lawyer was captured by the FBI three days later. Frustrated with their inability to capture Kelly, the go-between was roughed up until he confessed to where the Kellys were hiding but they managed to stay ahead of the law long enough to make it to Chicago. However, the Kellys were attracting so much attention that the syndicate refused to have anything to do with them. Unknown to them, the FBI had figured out where they were receiving messages but Melvin Purvis, the head of the FBI office in Chicago, actually managed to forget to send agents to stake out the location.
The FBI finally captured Kelly and Kathryn in Memphis early in the morning of September 26 and it has long been believed that he said “Don’t shoot, G-Men!” The G was supposed to stand for government, and although Hoover ensured that the story was endlessly repeated, it appears to have nofactual basis. However, FBI agent William Rorer, who made the arrest, has stated that Kathryn said that the g-men would never give them a break. The arrest was the bureau’s first big victory, so the public started to view it as the first line of defense in the war against the new breed of supercriminal.
Both Kelly and his wife, as well as Albert Bates, Harvey Bailey and Boss Shannon, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Although he served most of his time in Alcatraz, Kelly died of a heart attack in Leavenworth on July 18, 1954, his 54th birthday.
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Machine-Gun Kelly (1958)
Directed by Roger Corman, starring Charles Bronson and Susan Cabot
Kelly is a tough talking bank robber who is dominated by his wife. He attracts the attention of the FBI when his gang kidnaps a little girl and her nurse.
Dillinger (1973)
Directed by John Milius, starring Warren Oates and Ben Johnson
Following the death of several FBI agents during the Kansas City Massacre, FBI agent Melvin Purvis vows to capture or kill a number of famous outlaws including Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and John Dillinger. (please click here to read the review)
Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. Bryan Burrough, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.
The author grew up listening to stories about Bonnie and Clyde, and decided to write the book because there was no single history of that period, partially because the FBI files had only been released in the late 1980s. His access to previously sealed FBI files means that the story is as much about the evolution of the FBI as it is about the gangsters themselves. It is a superb, one-stop look at that brief period where outlaws seemed to roam free. Ignoring the easy approach of dividing the book into several sections that focus on individual gangs, the story is told in chronological order, which might appear confusing to some readers but serves to show how interrelated the events were. Most of the gangs knew each other and their paths crossed more frequently than I would have thought, which may help to explain why the FBI was so confused in the beginning. Burrough’s attention to detail is impressive, he shows what happened to the main FBI agents, the surviving outlaws who ended up in prison, and their various girlfriends and accomplices. What is odd is that once the War on Crime was over, no one really talked about it. The agents rarely told their families, while the families of the outlaws often preferred to move forward and leave their tainted past behind them.
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